A curious bestseller

Mark Haddon's award-winning novel about a boy with Asperger's syndrome has touched readers around the world. He talks to Mike Shuttleworth about writing it.

According to Chinese astrology, 2003 was the year of the goat, but in the book world it was the year of the dog.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon, was the big crossover hit book of the year. And it is going to get a lot bigger.

The awkwardly titled novel, told in the voice of a 15-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome, has now sold in 32 countries and is published in 15 languages.

The book has won prizes for youth literature in Britain; it won the fiction section of the Whitbread prize early last month as an adult novel and this month won the overall Whitbread prize.

Next year, Victorian VCE English students will study The Curious Incident.

This startlingly original story, which begins when an autistic boy finds his neighbour's poodle dead on the lawn, has surprised everyone - not least the author.

"In a way I do sometimes feel that I've stepped through a wormhole into a parallel version of my own life, which is a very nice version, but somewhat unexpected," Haddon said on the phone from his home in Oxford.

"I keep getting the strangest bits of news. It's just been a bestseller in Italy of all places. I think we just got Romania last week. There's only the Faroe Islands and Antarctica to go."

The Curious Incident is a virtual Rorschach test, exciting interest among readers of crime, young adult and literary fiction, and mainstream readers looking for a cracking good story.

The book is funny, gripping, sad and unstintingly entertaining.

In Britain, the book was released by Jonathan Cape and David Fickling Books for the adult and teenage market respectively.

I think people own the book in a way they don't own many books where the writer or character is stamped all over it. MARK HADDON, novelist

In the US, only an adult edition was released to capture a literary market, a decision vindicated with rave reviews such as Jay McInerney's in The New York Times, which praised the book's subtle ironies and haunting impact. Australian bookshops have the young adult edition.

The book's genuine cross-over success echoes the Harry Potter phenomenon, and the film rights to The Curious Incident have been bought by the makers of the Potter films with a screenplay by Steve Kloves at early draft stage.

But there is certainly nothing in Haddon's book that apes Harry Potter's schoolboy wizardry. This is a book grounded in realism, albeit with a wonderfully idiosyncratic narrator.

Haddon insists his main intention was to write a novel for adults, having already published more than a dozen books for children.

"I wanted with this book to get out of the ghetto of children's literature, so it came as a bit of a shock when my agent said, 'Let's try to sell it to a kid's publisher as well'."

Haddon refutes the assertion that the novel's success was assured. "I keep bumping into people who say, 'Oh, it was obvious you were going to be such a success, you have such a good formula' - If I'd gone into a publisher's office and said three years ago, 'Look I've got a great idea for a book about a 15-year-old boy with Asperger's living in Swindon with his dad who's a heating engineer', I'd have got the bum's rush."

A good deal of the buzz is generated by the narrator's Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. Christopher doesn't understand the emotions of other people around him and is fixated upon the details of his life.

Haddon, who left university in the early 1980s and worked for a time in centres for people with learning difficulties, admits to a continuing interest in disability.

But to write from the point of view of someone with Asperger's was an artistic choice and not a social statement.

"I think if I sat down to write a novel whose main subject was some kind of disability, that would have probably been the kiss of death. Once I got the stabbed dog, I knew there was a story there, however it panned out. And once I got some idea of who Christopher was, you just had to stick the two together and work out the sort of things that might happen," he says.

"I was very lucky early on that those two things seemed to fit together so well. The Asperger's came along surprisingly late in the day.

"Far from doing lots of research about Asperger's to make Christopher right or typical, or representative, I actually put him together as a patchwork of character traits and habits and behaviours, all of which I borrowed from people I know, and none of them would ever be labelled as having a disability," he said.

Haddon believes that such widespread interest in his book has a lot to do with Christopher's world-view.

"He leaves so much out that people have to fill in all the gaps, and every reader seems to fill in the gaps in the way that suits them. Which is, I think, one of the reasons that a lot of people seem to have rather taken the book to heart. I think they own the book in a way you don't own many books, where the writer or character is stamped all over it. This book is full of holes that you fill in with your own ideas."

The book is also strikingly designed. Haddon produced the illustrations, after hours of doodling on his computer, to represent images and signs from Christopher's life, including maps, graphs and mathematical equations.

Visually, it is full of intrigue and surprise, but it is not a picture book. It also weaves into the narrative Christopher's gift for mathematics, which Haddon took in his final years at high school.

"One funny aspect of the book in terms of the letters I get is that it attracts a certain kind of anally retentive middle-aged male reader, who spots the tiniest logical faults.

"They seem to forget that it is a work of fiction and that Christopher is (a) fictional and (b) a human being like everyone else and not meant to be perfect. We've cleared up a couple of the more glaring mathematical errors but now when I write back to people I say, 'He's 15, he's good at maths, but he's not perfect, he's allowed to have a few mistakes'."

As a teenager Haddon had himself planned to study mathematics and philosophy at university, but says he was "saved" by the discovery of English literature. He also admits that while he understood the concepts, he was often very bad at the detail.

"With English literature if you do a bit of shonky spelling no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero everything just crashes into the ravine."

He studied literature at Merton College, Oxford. His father was an architect who specialised in the design of abattoirs and his mother "was, as the Americans say, a home-maker".

While there is artistic flair in the family, the storytelling impulse is something of a mystery.

"I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books. I was recently asked what was my favourite book as a child and I still have it on my desk. It's called The Origins of the Universe and it's by Albert Hinklebein. It is a hilarious read now because most of it is completely wrong.

"When I was 13 or 14 I started devouring novels, literature took quite a while to take me over but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

"As a teenager I was always this strange mixture of kind of vice-captain of the rugby team and sensitive artist type the rest of the time. I was sent away to this public school in the middle of nowhere and I think we managed to completely miss out on normal youth culture.

"I get my young persons' music now. I'm an ageing 40-something rock fan always buying the Flaming Lips and Sparklehorse, and wondering do I, or don't I, like the Strokes. Hmm, maybe not. But I have to make up for missing out on it as a teenager."

Haddon is married and has two children. He admits to a low boredom threshold, which partly explains why he has written across a range of areas including children's picture books and stories, screenplays (he has won two Britsh Academy of Film and Televison Arts awards), poetry and novels.

Being driven as a writer clearly extends to other areas of Haddon's life. His recent reading is diverse; he mentions Lorrie Moore, A.M. Holmes and Dave Eggers and the McSweeneys crowd.

Away from the desk Haddon paints abstract pictures in acrylic that he sells through a local gallery. He is also in training for the London marathon and is into other extreme sports such as marathon canoeing, paddling up to 35 kilometres as a training-run on the nearby River Thames.

He is also 30,000 words into his next novel with the working title Blood and Scissors. "Obviously not a cross-over novel," he says.

With two children at home, the youngest just a few weeks old, he might soon have to find somewhere else to work.

"Luckily, I work very fast, although to me I work quite slowly, because I squeeze a lot of child care and marathon canoeing in around it. But you can't actually write productively for many long hours in a day, and most writers have to find something else to do with their time. For a large number it's alcohol abuse and family breakdown. I'd much prefer sport and child care."

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is published by David Fickling Books at $29.95.